


The Curious Death And Rebirth Of Lifzan Onodiun Surent The Archaic Mayhem

by draconicsockpuppet



Category: Dwarf Fortress
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Canon-Typical Crack, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Mad Engineers And The People Who Love Them, Necromancy, Poor Life Choices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:47:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23507848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draconicsockpuppet/pseuds/draconicsockpuppet
Summary: Sometimes bad ideas are the best ideas.(Or, what happens when you give a bronze colossus in a box to a dwarven engineer.)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 13
Collections: Robot Rainbow 2020





	1. The Curious Death And Rebirth Of Lifzan Onodiun Surent The Archaic Mayhem

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tuesday](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesday/gifts).



Lifzan Onodiun Surent The Archaic Mayhem was a bronze colossus. It was one of the only ones of its kind. Lifzan was associated with war, strength, and metals.  
In 1135, Lifzan settled in the Puzzling Mire.  
In the early summer of 1136, Lifzan became an enemy of The Strong Labors.  
In 1136, the dwarf Ber Begungold confronted Lifzan.  
In the early summer of 1136, Lifzan struck down the dwarf Ber Begungold.  
In 1136, the dwarf Limul Tradewards ambushed Lifzan.  
In the late summer of 1136, Lifzan fought with the dwarf Limul Tradewards. While defeated, the latter escaped unscathed.

* * *

"This is a terrible idea," Ingish Giftedmetal said, not for the first time.

"We can't just leave it there," Limul Tradewards told her. "It'll attack again. Either we kill it or it kills us."

"Catch, not kill," said Bomrek Dimpledagger. "Wow. Will you look at that."

The bronze colossus stomped across the hillside; it had not yet spotted them.

"Is the trap set?" Limul asked Bomrek.

She shrugged and ran her hands through her hair. "You only wanted one? I put out thirty. We had plenty of cages and mechanisms and webbing, although I did have to jury rig a few things."

Limul blinked. "That should make this easier, then."

"We should put up a chair next to the traps as bait," Ingish said. "Don't monsters like chairs?"

"I'm the bait," Limul said. He was the fastest runner in Tongsfountain, as evidenced by his victory in the mountainhome's annual footrace three years in a row. "… I won't trip the traps, will I? With the webbing?"

"Not if I show you where they are first," Bomrek said.

That took ten minutes. The colossus was still slowly stomping around; the hillside shook with every mighty step.

Bomrek couldn't take her eyes off it.

"Does it have a name?" Ingish asked.

"Does it matter?" Limul retorted. "It killed my husband. We're taking it down."

Ingish and Bomrek exchanged a long look. "You have a point," Ingish admitted.

"I wonder what it's made of," Bomrek muttered to herself as Limul sprinted through the trees.

Ingish hefted her crossbow. "He's still grief-sick, isn't he?"

"Our family's always been practical," Bomrek said. "He's not throwing tankards or getting into fights with innocent dwarves. He's addressing the actual problem." And protecting the other dwarves of Tongsfountain at the same time.

The stomping sped up, and the colossus veered their way. Ingish and Bomrek hid in a bush a few dozen blocks from the trap field. Limul sprinted past, carefully avoiding one trap after another after –

Oops.

Still, he was trapped in a cage at the far side of the trap field, and the colossus would have to make it past four other rows, with six cage traps each, to get to him. It could make it, if it saw the traps and if it was dextrous enough to step diagonally past them, but bronze colossi were not the most nimble or perceptive of creatures.

They also did not fit well into dwarf-sized wooden cages. Still, the bars held, although Bomrek wasn't sure how all that bronze managed to stay in there; the cage was smaller than the sum of the colossus's toes. Trapped inside, the colossus looked like a solid lump of metal that occasionally wiggled. She'd never tell her brother, but she wanted one of her very own – preferably non-murderous. It would make an amazing fortress defender, if she could only repurpose it.

Tongsfountain threw a massive party when Limul, Bomrek, and Ingish returned to the mountainhome with a caged cube of bronze in a wheelbarrow.

"Melt the thing down," Limul told Bomrek before he headed off to drink and sleep.

"Sure," Bomrek said, her fingers crossed behind her back.

She did not melt the thing down. She took it back to her workshop instead.

* * *

"It does have a name," Ingish said as she paged through a scroll she'd stolen from the library. All sprawled out, she took up a good half of Bomrek's workbench as she ate rock nuts and read scrolls and kicked her feet, but Bomrek didn't mind. Ingish was good company.

"Does it?" Bomrek looked up from the half-carved quartzite mechanism she was working on. "What's it called?"

"Lifzan Onodiun Surent the Archaic Mayhem." Ingish sounded out each syllable of the unfamiliar words separately. "What a tongue twister."

"It could be worse," Bomrek said. "You've met my mother."

Ingish nodded. Even the most taciturn of dwarves might gain an unwieldy title by accident. You only called Kulet Agoslan Zustashustos Bidok by her full name if you wanted to see first-hand how she'd slain twelve goblins with a newborn baby and a full bucket of pig milk. To those who liked living, like her lovers and children, she was still Kulet Daubedwinds.

"Lifzan, then," Bomrek went on. "How do you think it came to be?"

"Well, it's made of metal…" Ingish said slowly. "Do you think it was forged?"

"If it was, I want to make one," Bomrek said. "No, I want an army of them, but on our side, not rampaging around killing random people's brothers-in-law."

Ingish lifted an eyebrow. "Do you think you can?"

"The first thing to do with a new toy is take it apart, right?"

"I thought the first thing you always do is throw the instructions away," Ingish said.

Bomrek grinned. "Luckily, it didn't come with any. What a puzzle!"

Bomrek _adored_ puzzles.

* * *

The next three months were a whirlwind of study and experimentation; several other dwarves in the fortress were just as enthused about her puzzle as she was. What created a bronze colossus? How did they move? Why did they turn into statues when they died? And why did they hoard treasure? Tongsfountain's eight scholars immediately set to work studying and arguing about these questions. Bomrek was more concerned with questions like, how do I melt it down and make more of them? And how do I keep them under control when I do?

"You don't control them," her father rasped when she told him about her project. "You teach them, you give them what they need to grow, and you love them. If you're lucky, they'll love you back. That's the most effective way to keep them from going mad and killing us all."

Bomrek was the family expert in mechanics, but her father was the dwarf she knew who best understood people; after all, none of his sixteen children had ever started a tantrum spiral. She took his advice seriously and considered how it might apply to mindless statue creatures. In the meanwhile, she discussed the intricacies of making a dwarf-sized and shaped automaton with her fellow mechanics.

She'd learned about logic gates and minecart computing while doing her training, of course, but only the basics; Bomrek had never had need of them before. Esmul Floodhelm, who kept the mountainhome's massive minecart sorter running, showed her how more intricate systems of gates might be used to give commands and switch track systems on and off depending on stockpile conditions. Esmul claimed the same logic could be used to create full intelligence.

Bomrek could see the similarities to how dwarves thought, although of course their own minds were more complex. She thanked Esmul, but gate logic wasn't quite what she was looking for. Not even a full-sized bronze colossus's head could hold _that_ many minecarts.

A few days later, Uthar Lioncactus, who was responsible for forging the gold and silver mechanisms which decorated the nobility's chambers, showed her how to melt down a piece of the bronze colossus that Bomrek had managed to chip off with a steel pickaxe. When the ingot came out of the smelter, Uthar took her to the forge and expertly hammered the metal into the rough shape of a dwarf. The chip was only the size of her hand, but as the metal cooled, it began to move its arms.

Uthar began to laugh, his gut and beard shaking with merriment. "You've got your work cut out for you with this little one. Try to teach it not to murder us all, eh?"

Bomrek took the little mannikin back to her room and locked it in her sundries chest. Her idea was suddenly much closer to realization, but she was also beginning to realize she needed a safer place to store her project.

"There are undead massing at the old shrine," Mayor Saltwise told her that night as they ate side by side in the great dining room. "Work on your own projects all you like, but we need the hillsides well supplied with traps."

Bomrek could do that.

But the constant scratching from her sundries chest could not be denied. In between churning out mechanisms and installing cage and weapon traps all over the surface, she went and visited her oldest sister, Thash Mulewhisky, one of the mountainhome's most skilled miners.

"Does Limul know you're doing this?" Thash raised both her eyebrows.

Bomrek shook her head.

"I see why you need a place to hide them." Thash took another look over Bomrek's sketches. "I'll have the crew put in a chamber on the other side of the third cavern. That should keep any longnoses out."

The caverns were contiguous with the greater cave systems beneath the earth; a forgotten beast could wander in at any time. Bomrek gulped. "Can't you put in a safe access tunnel or something?"

Thash sighed. "Look at it this way. You want them to be a fortress defense system, right?"

Bomrek nodded.

"So you need to give them something to defend." Thash gave her a wink and a cheerful smile. "You're fast. You'll be fine."

Her sister was right; hiding her project on the other side of the cavern would keep the colossus away from any dwarven snoops. It would also keep _her_ from spending all her time there. Bomrek could respect her sister's caution. Between one dwarf and the mountainhome, the mountainhome would always be first in a sensible dwarf's mind.

Bomrek was not what most dwarves would consider sensible. The gleaming colossus stood tall in her mind, its long slow steps vibrating through her dreams and her waking hours alike. And the scratching from the little mannikin in her chest never stopped.

A week later, Thash and Esmul came by Bomrek's room just as she was laying down to sleep. "It's ready," Thash said.

Esmul grinned and waved at Bomrek and then kissed Thash on the cheek and kept going deeper into the sleeping halls. Bomrek stared after her, then stared at Thash. Thash shrugged. "She helped with the traps and drawbridges."

"That was not about the drawbridges," Bomrek said.

Thash rolled her eyes. "You're not a child any more. Big sis gets to date too."

Bomrek gave a deep sigh, but followed as Thash led her to the layer just above the magma forges – oh. Oh. Thash _did_ dig a narrow access tunnel after all.

"Yeah, it's not so bad," Thash said. "Come on."

The access tunnel led past a long line of traps and drawbridges to a staircase, and at the top of the staircase was a lever and another closed drawbridge.

"Ready?" Thash asked.

Bomrek gulped and nodded.

Thash pulled the lever; the drawbridge creaked down. Thash started sprinting, and Bomrek followed, huffing and puffing. A few dozen blocks away there was another lowered drawbridge, and on the other side, smooth stone walls and another lever. Thash pulled it immediately, and Bomrek reached the little cubby just as the drawbridge began to raise again.

"They're paired, so both levers will raise and lower both drawbridges," Thash said.

Bomrek nodded her understanding.

There was another staircase, and at the bottom, a magma forge and a mechanic's workbench and a bed. Bomrek looked around in awe. There was plenty of room to furnish however she liked, and it was all hers.

"Will this do?" Thash asked.

"It's wonderful," Bomrek told her.

"Don't tell Limul you saved the thing that killed his husband," Thash advised before she disappeared up the staircase.

Bomrek took the drawings out of her pocket and stared down at them. "By the time I'm done with that colossus," she whispered, "death would probably be kinder."

Oh well. It's not like it had a nervous system. The bronze colossus was a gigantic walking statue that had murdered her brother-in-law. Bomrek had plenty of justification to try and reform that metal into something that would benefit the mountainhome.

Also, she thought having her own army of invulnerable bronze automatons would be really cool.

* * *

Winter passed quietly. The hillside was covered with snow, and traps, and more traps. Bomrek finally stopped when there was nowhere else to put more mechanisms – well, unless she asked Mayor Saltwise to order the trees clear-cut, and then they'd have _real_ problems.

It was time to work on her own projects.

She chopped piece after piece of the bronze colossus off and carried them down to her hidden lair in the caverns. After a month Thash caved and built her a tunnel with walls and a ceiling and ramps on both sides so anyone trying to cross the cavern could go over. Bomrek moved her belongings into the workshop, and set a small stockpile that the kitchens furnished with massive stacks of precooked iguana egg biscuits and barrels of dwarven wine. Then she brought the caged colossus in on a wheelbarrow and bricked the tunnel off.

Bomrek told herself as she laid another layer of mortar that if anything urgent happened, Thash knew where she was. Her sister would come and find her if she was needed.

It took a while to melt the colossus down. After trying and failing to forge a figure as she'd seen Uthar do, Bomrek decided to build molds instead. Two arms, two legs, a torso, a helmeted head – she started by carving the shapes she wanted in soft tower cap wood, then used sand-casting to replicate them with melted down colossus metal.

Sometimes she thought she heard it screaming in her sleep.

It was lonely work; Bomrek had never noticed how much time she'd spent with Ingish until her dearest friend was gone. Still, she had an important task on her hands, and she had to keep her own morale up. A crazy dwarf was a dead dwarf.

She took the little mannikin out of the sundries chest and set it on her workbench. "I think you look like an Urist," she told it. "That's a joke. Every dwarf looks like an Urist. That makes you one of us, get it?"

The mannikin stilled, like it was listening to her. Bomrek chattered on, not quite paying attention to what came out of her mouth as she carved off bronze and melted it and made piece after endless piece of ex-colossus automaton parts.

"I really am sorry about this," she told it as she began to screw her first prototype together. "I thought the original you was amazing and wonderful just as you were, but you also killed my brother-in-law. So now you have to change. For dwarves who murder, there's the hammerer, who comes along and breaks their legs and drags them off in chains. For you…" She stopped. "I suppose I'm your hammerer. Chisel-er."

The mannikin watched, motionless.

"It's nothing personal," she assured it, and kept working.

At least the colossus wasn't screaming in her dreams any more. But by the time she'd finished melting it down and assembling dwarf-sized versions, she was out of ideas. None of them had moved during the process. She'd rambled on for Armok only knew how many weeks, or months – Bomrek never wanted to see another iguana egg in her life – and for what?

Finally she sat before her workbench and looked at the rows of automatons that stood motionless before her. Then she looked up to the little mannikin on her workbench.

"Now what?"

The little mannikin wiggled and creaked and jumped off the bench. "Now. What."

Bomrek closed her mouth. "Good! Very good!" She turned her head to the other automatons. They looked just like dwarves, if dwarves had to wear bronze full plate armor made by a mechanic who wasn't very good at armoring.

"Good," repeated the rows of automatons. Their voices sounded like a cracked bell, all vibrating together at the same pitch.

Bomrek smiled through her tears – happy tears, proud tears. "You are dwarves of Tongsfountain now. This is your home. The dwarves are your people. We care for each other, and we defend each other. Do you understand?"

"Dwarves. Of. Tongsfountain," the rows of automatons said as one.

"Close enough," Bomrek decided, and then she hugged the little mannikin.

A great sigh went through the room like a sudden single burst of breeze, but automatons couldn't breathe, so Bomrek decided not to worry about it.

* * *

It took weeks more to teach her bronze dwarves basic commands like "come here" and "wash that goo off your face", but Bomrek was happy to do so. The bronze dwarves moved slowly, with the same lumbering stride that the colossus had demonstrated but in miniature. They were quite obedient, and when she told them the stories her mother had told her – well, except for the Third Battle of Tongsfountain, because she wanted her creations to know that babies were wonders, not weapons – they sat and listened far more patiently than she and her siblings had as children. And they repeated her words back to her regularly, slowly learning to communicate on their own, though they didn't seem to get the point of tenses or articles or grammar in general.

Bomrek had no idea how much time had passed by this point; she'd ignored the calendar for the first while she'd been down here, and it seemed a bit of a waste to try and start tracking time at this late date. But for all she'd expected her sister to come and find her if something happened, she was still surprised when a scrabbling at the wall turned into Thash's face.

"You're not dead, good," Thash said. "Come on out; the mountainhome is under attack. If your toys are any good, you may as well use them to defend us now."

Bomrek scrambled up off the floor as the bronze dwarves repeated, "Defend," in their singular hollow voice.

"The fuck," Thash said, staring at them. "Yeah. That'll do fine. Not even Limul can complain, if he's still alive."

"Limul," Bomrek whispered, and then she was running up the stairs, and through the tunnel, and back down the stairs, a long narrow passage all the way to the halls of magma furnaces: rows upon rows of smelters and forges and kilns, usually populated by workers, now completely still. The coordinated thumping of heavy footsteps told her her automatons followed.

She rounded a corner and there was a recently dead dwarf standing there, their disemboweled guts spilling down to the floor, eyes blank and hands frozen into claws, reaching for her throat.

Necromancy.

Bomrek swallowed and plucked the mannikin off her shoulder. "I'm sorry," she told it, and then she smashed it into the dead dwarf's face. Brain spattered everywhere, but the dead dwarf went down… 

And clutched sharp nails into her ankle. Bomrek screamed in pain and dropped the mannikin, which pulled the dead dwarf's hand away from her ankle like the flesh was soft wax and the bone, kindling; Bomrek heard it snap. The mannikin went into a fury, beating the corpse into a wiggling hash of meat on the floor.

"That won't stop it," Bomrek told the mannikin. "Thank you for saving me, but if you want to make that thing quit moving, you have to find its master."

The mannikin tilted its little hammered bronze head up at her as the corpse-meat writhed on the floor.

Oh. She was still on fourth year tales with the automatons; necromancy was for twelfth year, for dwarves who were old enough to work and wed and appreciate the necessary finality of death. Of course the mannikin wouldn't understand.

"There's a necromancer here somewhere, raising the dead," Bomrek said. "Find it, and kill it, and all the dead it raised will fall with it."

The mannikin looked at her, and looked at the hall before them. Screaming echoed from the staircase.

Heavy footsteps thumped up behind her.

"I've got to hand it to you, you've sure made _something_ out of that colossus," Thash said. "Can you get them to tell the difference between dwarves and … dead things?"

"They're dwarves too," Bomrek said. "Living creatures care for each other. The dead only eat."

"Huh," Thash said. "I have some questions about your sorting criteria, but sure. For now, we can go with that."

The bronze dwarves rushed into the fortress, lining up in perfect rows like soldiers. The mannikin hopped up on Bomrek's shoulder. "Find. Necro. Mancer," it said. "We. Kill. Necro. Mancer."

Bomrek blinked a few times before she realized: "Oh! You want _me_ to find the necromancer." She looked at Thash.

Thash shrugged. "Do you really think I had a lot of time to read in the mines?" she said. "I don't know any more than you do. There's a lot of screaming, and it's not lava-related, and I figured your project might be able to help. That's all I've got."

Bomrek sighed and led her stompy dwarf-sized automatons up the stairs. They found Ingish a dozen floors up, swinging the butt of her crossbow into a cloud of flying, gnashing, blood-stained teeth that swarmed around her.

"Where's the bone-raiser," Thash yelled.

Ingish stared at her, and then at Bomrek, and then she blinked at the mass of bronze dwarves following them both up. "Up there somewhere," she yelled back, and waved her free arm at the ceiling.

Bomrek followed her up. Ingish had armor and a helmet and an empty quiver at her side, but Bomrek had her bronze dwarves around her, shielding her with their own bodies; flesh and bone could do nothing against their metal skin. They formed a wedge protecting Ingish and Bomrek and Thash alike as they ascended the stairs and fought through the hordes of the walking dead. The living dwarves of the fortress saw them and joined behind, letting Bomrek's bronze dwarves take the brunt of the battle like a seabreak repelling a wave.

At the top of the staircase stood the trade depot. A scrawny human man in a black robe was prying up emeralds one by one out of the golden floor. An honor guard of zombies surrounded him, tall and thin, with long pointed ears and dead for long enough that the flesh had dried and cracked – elves. This was not the first city this particular necromancer had attacked.

"That's him," Ingish said. "We tried to shoot him, but he had too many meat shields to hide behind, and then we ran out of ammunition."

Bomrek looked at her mannikin and pointed at the necromancer. "Kill it," she ordered.

With a roar, the bronze dwarves rushed at the scrawny human in a seething mass of metal. When they separated, there was nothing left of the necromancer or his guards but a thin layer of bloody mush and splintered bone on the floor.

"I missed you," Ingish said, wiping her face clean of blood.

Bomrek felt tears beading in her eyes. "I missed you too."

"You know," Ingish said pointedly, "most dwarves don't go to the trouble of walling themselves away from their family and friends while they go through a strange mood."

"Oh." Bomrek stopped. "Was that what that was? Really?"

Ingish raised both bushy eyebrows and stared at her.

"Maybe it was." Bomrek pinched the bridge of her nose. "Huh. I always thought it would feel different, somehow."

Ingish laughed. "Congratulations!"

Bomrek smiled slowly and looked out over her handiwork: three hundred bronze dwarves, coated in the blood and viscera of their enemies, ready and willing to defend Tongsfountain to the best of their abilities.

She could easily believe they were the best work she'd ever make.


	2. Coda

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everyone but the necromancer enjoys their happy ending.

It took more than a month to clean up the remains of the battle, bury the dead, and carve enough slabs to commemorate all the missing. Bomrek's family had fared relatively well, with no deaths even among the multitude of siblings she didn't see regularly, although there were plenty of injuries and dismemberments to keep the sawbones busy. She thought Limul's eyepatch looked rather dashing, and their mother, pregnant again, had kept the undead out of the pigpen even without a baby to swing around.

On the first of Sandstone, Tongsfountain held a great feast to commemorate their heroes. Mayor Saltwise, his empty sleeve hanging limp at his right side, led the king up from his opulent prison for long enough to give out shiny steel medals. Bomrek and Ingish and Thash all got one, and so did the three hundred bronze dwarves, standing with their articulated necks bowed while the rickety old dwarf in a crown tried to fit the steel chains over their helmet-like heads.

Later, during the revelries, Limul sought her out while she swilled rum and danced with Ingish.

"You said you were going to melt it down!" he yelled.

"I did!" Bomrek yelled back.

Limul laughed and tugged her into a massive squeezing hug. Something inside Bomrek relaxed, a tension she hadn't even noticed; her brother wasn't angry with her for repurposing the colossus. After they parted, she saw Thash on the other side of the dining hall, leading the bronze dwarves in some kind of synchronized movement. Perhaps the miners had their own dances; she didn't recognize this one.

"What's going on?" She shouted over the din once she'd made her way through the press of the crowd, Ingish following in her wake. "Is that a miner's dance?"

"Coordinated training exercise," Thash shouted back. The little bronze mannikin sat on her shoulder and watched, its head tilted to the side. "But they had the coordination down from the start, so yeah, dancing."

"Sounds like fun," Bomrek said, and she took Ingish by the hand. The three hundred bronze dwarves' heads all swiveled around, and Thash led them haltingly through the gyrations of 'Squad Hammering Technique Number Three'.

Or, as it later became known, the Bronze Colossus Reel.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Demitas for beta reading.
> 
> The bronze colossus's name is a combination of three different [paint color names created by a neural network](https://aiweirdness.com/tagged/paint-colors). (Not that I can tell the difference between that and, say, Goblin.)


End file.
